Alumna Encourages Afghan Women Entrepreneurs

The first time she stepped off a plane in Kabul, Afghanistan, Kate Buggeln, BA’83 (R), was more than a little nervous.

After landing in the war-torn capital during the winter of 2005, she found herself in a hostile-seeming world in which stone-faced men with AK-47s were a common sight, running water and electricity were rarely available … and where no lone woman was ever visible on the ice-shrouded streets of the city.

Lying awake in her hotel room at 4:30 a.m., she listened to the haunting cry of an Islamic muezzin as he called the city to morning prayers.

It was an unnerving introduction to post-Taliban Afghanistan for an American woman who’d spent most of her professional life as a marketing and strategy executive in New York City, admits Buggeln.

“You lie there in your hotel room before dawn, listening to that wailing voice,” says the former FDU history major. “Of course, you’ve already been told by the news media that any American who dares to visit Kabul is likely to die at any moment.

“So you toss and turn, and it’s easy to imagine that the voice on the loudspeakers is calling everyone to go kill the Americans in their hotel rooms!”

But soon after Buggeln (pronounced BYOO-guh-lynne) began exploring the city, she learned that the muezzin had simply been calling the citizenry to morning prayers. “All he was saying was, ‘God is great,’ and ‘It’s better to pray than sleep!’” explains this successful businesswoman-turned-international-volunteer-for-peace, while chuckling at her own naïveté. “In reality, while it remained a war zone, there was little to fear — but I had to walk around and talk to people for a while before I learned that.”

For Buggeln — who’d traveled to Kabul as an unpaid volunteer for the Business Council for Peace [a.k.a. Bpeace], an international program designed to help Afghan women launch new businesses — learning about “the real Afghanistan, as opposed to the myths” was right in character.

“As an entrepreneur myself, I’ve always believed you ought to frighten yourself a bit each day,” she says. “To accomplish that, I ski as often as I can, and I go to Afghanistan! I’ve traveled there four different times now, and I’m now working with a network of Afghan women who’ve been launching new businesses all around the country in recent years.”

Ask this former marketing guru for several top American retail brands (including Coach and L.L.Bean) why she decided to step away from her own high-powered business career for a couple of years in order to serve as a volunteer in one of the world’s most impoverished countries, and she’ll explain that she’s “totally committed” to the Bpeace goal of “working to change the world by teaching women in ‘conflict-areas’ to build businesses as a way to foster peace. (For more information see www.bpeace.org.)

“As a former retail executive, I really wanted to bring my skills to this challenge. At Bpeace, we’re working hard to help teach Afghan women about business, and we also have several similar programs up and running in Rwanda [where she has also visited]. During the past couple of years, we’ve helped women in Afghanistan open clothing stores, day-care centers, a women’s-only fitness center and several other enterprises.

“These new ventures represent huge breakthroughs for the Afghan women involved, establishing new economic and social models for their communities. One of our Bpeace associates even ran for political office there, after being encouraged by Bpeace’s support for her goals. She won!

“Our approach at Bpeace is all about creating possibilities and working with our associates to make them happen. We’re convinced that small business can have a role in transforming the post-Taliban world of Afghanistan, but we need more people to help.”

Raised on Long Beach Island, N.J., Buggeln arrived on FDU’s Rutherford Campus back in the fall of 1979. Already a hard-charging entrepreneur (“I launched my first business at age 11 — housecleaning for all the rich people in town!”), she soon found a dynamic mentor in history professor Helen Brudner, who still teaches at FDU today and is associate director and coordinator of graduate programs at FDU’s School of History, Political and International Studies on the Metropolitan Campus.

“I will be forever grateful to Dr. Brudner,” she says, “because she taught me and a lot of other women not to rely on our looks but on our brains. As a history teacher, she also taught us how to make connections between things. She showed us how the present moment is always part of a historical context.

“As a retail marketer, I soon discovered that knowing how to make such connections between things was the key to success. Retailing is all about connecting people with products they will buy.”

After earning her degree magna cum laude, Buggeln launched what would be a 20-year marketing career that would take her inside the boardrooms of some of America’s most highly regarded blue-chip retailing companies. Today she runs her own retail consulting business, which is on hold while she continues her volunteer work overseas.

“I started in retail at Bloomingdale’s in New York City,” she remembers, “because it was one of the few places that would hire a liberal arts major straight out of college during the recession of 1983. There was no money — I made $14,000 a year to start — and it wasn’t easy at first because I knew nothing about the industry and didn’t even like to shop! But I succeeded by figuring out how the system worked and then finding ways to make it work better.

“I’ve been called ‘relentless’ by more than a few of my colleagues over the years, and I think they have identified one of my few strengths! Somehow, I’ve always had this ability to focus on the task at hand and then work very hard at getting it done.”

Steve Kulovits, BS’82 (R), who met Buggeln on campus and married her a few years later, says the “relentless” tag is accurate. “Kate is one of the most focused people I’ve ever met,” he adds. An administrator at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York, he’s also a volunteer who’s twice accompanied his spouse to Kabul. “She’s very passionate about her volunteer work, because she really believes each one of us is called upon to contribute to the world in some way.”

Buggeln was inspired as a result of witnessing the tragedy of September 11. At work that day in an office not far from ground zero, she watched the disaster unfold — and then decided that she wanted to put her career on hold and spend a year or two doing volunteer work for peace.

She spent several months looking around for the right opportunity and then found “the perfect fit” at Bpeace. “I asked myself: ‘What are you going to do about the problems that are causing so much conflict in the world?’ For me, the answer was to use my business and life skills to help women in places like Afghanistan and Rwanda empower themselves by starting their own businesses.”

During recent trips to Afghanistan, Buggeln has helped several women start their own business ventures. Each time she returns, she visits her friends Afifa (the operator of a new women’s gym), Tami (a day-care center operator) and Nasria and Alia, whose embroidery-exporting enterprise is thriving.

Says the relentless Buggeln while describing her passion for “making connections” between Third World women and economic opportunity, “I guess I’m a pretty hopeful person, because I have seen with my own eyes the change that is possible when people act. What is really powerful is knowing that each and every one of us has skills that can transform the world. You just have to find your way to share them.”

Kate Buggeln can be contacted at kbuggeln@gmail.com.

— T.N.

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